Reforming Communism, Refusing Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of the Concept of "Socialist Market" focuses on the concept of “socialist market,: a cornerstone of political economy in Soviet-type societies undergoing economic reforms from the 1950s onward. Encouraged by the success of non-capitalist mixed economies, market reformers (also called 'market socialists') offered the communist ruling elites a remedy for the persistent crises of the planned economy. Besides optimal planning...

This edited volume opening the new series Revisiting Communism: Collectivist Economic Thought in Historical Perspective focuses on the concepts of ownership, the cornerstone of political economy in Soviet-type societies. The authors’ main objective is to contribute to the still unwritten chapter on collectivism in the history books of modern economic thought. They trace the lengthy evolution of economic ideas of property reform under communism leading from the doctrine of blanket nationali...

This volume examines concepts of central planning, a cornerstone of political economy in Soviet-type societies. It revolves around the theory of “optimal planning” which promised a profound modernization of Stalinist-style verbal planning. Encouraged by cybernetic dreams in the 1950s and supporting the strategic goals of communist leaders in the Cold War, optimal planners offered the ruling elites a panacea for the recurrent crises of the planned economy. Simultaneously, their planning pro...

Socialism is a yearning for justice, community, and the greater realization of human potential. Cornel West calls it “the best accessible and reliable treatment we have of what socialism is, was, and should be.”Understanding Socialism is a plainspoken text that disarms false narratives, confronts past failures, and offers a path to a fresh and modern understanding of socialism, by outlining what democracy in the workplace could look like.Wolff not ...

The Chinese Revolution changed the face of the twentieth century, and the politics that issued from it—often referred to as “Maoism”—resonated with colonized and oppressed people from the 1970s down to the anticapitalist movements of today. But how did these politics first emerge? And what do they offer activists today, who seek to transform capitalist society at its very foundations?Maoism and the Chinese Revolution offers the novice reader a sweeping overview of five dec...

The worldwide spread of neoliberalism has transformed economies, polities, and societies everywhere. In conventional accounts, American and Western European economists, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, sold neoliberalism by popularizing their free-market ideas and radical criticisms of the state. Rather than focusing on the agency of a few prominent, conservative economists, Markets in the Name of Socialism reveals a dialogue among many economists on both sides of ...

A masterful account of the global Cold War’s decisive influence on Soviet economic reform, and the national decay that followed.What brought down the Soviet Union? From some perspectives the answers seem obvious, even teleological—communism was simply destined to fail. When Yakov Feygin studied the question, he came to another conclusion: at least one crucial factor was a deep contradiction within the Soviet political economy brought about by the country’s attempt ...

A quarter century after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia once again looms large over world affairs, from Ukraine to Syria to the 2016 U.S. election. Yet how power works in present-day Russia—how Vladimir Putin came to power and maintains his rule—remains opaque and often misunderstood. In The Putin System, Russian economist and opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky explains his country’s politics from a unique perspective, voicing a Russian liberal critique of the post-Soviet sy...

A critical analysis of Karl Marx’s Capital, which is without question one of the most influential books to be published in the course of the past two centuries. Controversial in its politics, and arriving at conclusions that are passionately debated to this day, it is nonetheless a fine example of the creative combination of a philosophical method (the dialectic) with historical and economic information to produce a new interpretation of history.Capitalism, thought Marx, w...

Post-Communist Russia is an instance of the phenomenon of authoritarian modernization project, which is perceived as a set of policies intended to achieve a high level of economic development, while political freedoms remain beyond the current modernization agenda or are postponed to a distant future. Why did Russia (unlike many countries of post-Communist Europe) pursue authoritarian modernization after the Soviet collapse? What is the ideational agenda behind this project and why does it...

'Does a great service by shifting our attention to the oppositional movements of Chinese workers, peasants, students, and women who have contested inequality and exploitation' - Manfred ElfstromTracing the fascinating history of left-wing, subversive and oppositional forces in China over the last 70 years, Ralf Ruckus pulls back the curtain on Chinese politics.He looks at the interconnected movements since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, drawing out ...

This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars working to address the puzzling durability of communist autocracies in Eastern Europe and Asia, which are the longest-lasting type of non-democratic regime to emerge after World War I. The volume conceptualizes the communist universe as consisting of the ten regimes in Eastern Europe and Mongolia that eventually collapsed in 1989–91, and the five regimes that survived the fall of the Berlin Wall: China, Vietnam, Laos, North Kore...